How to Make the SEO Case to Small Businesses - Whiteboard&nbspFriday

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

Belief in the process can be the make-or-break factor when it comes to convincing small businesses they need SEO. Overcoming skepticism can be daunting, but there are strategic ways to go about pitching your case to potential clients that will smooth the way for you. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand covers a 5-step process to making the SEO case to those small and medium businesses that need a little extra push to help you help them.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're chatting about how to make the SEO case to small businesses, small business owners, small business CEOs, maybe even some medium businesses as well.

I want to start by saying that this is a challenge for a lot of us, but it's a challenge for both types of SEO folks. For in-house folks, you might be the marketing person at your company. Maybe there's only a handful of you, you're a relatively small business, and you're trying to make the case, "Hey, boss, team, we should invest in SEO." Likewise, for a lot of consultants who are serving small and medium businesses or very small local businesses, making this case to potential clients can be really tough too. That's what we're here to talk about.

Step 1: Show search queries with OBVIOUS intent

The thing that I recommend starting with always is show search queries with obvious purchase intent, obvious visitor intent, where it's essentially just a no-brainer to imagine that 7 out of 10 people who are searching for this particular query are going to be looking to make a transaction with your business or with a business just like yours.

So, for example, if I'm a dentist, I'm not sure that I would go in and I would pitch them, "Hey, there are a lot of searches for teeth hygiene tips. We could do some great content marketing, build some great brand awareness." You can imagine the head of a dental practice saying, "You know, I'm not sure that's going to convert into business for us, at least not directly."

Maybe you can make that tougher case around content marketing and secondary branding and all that kind of stuff. But if you say, "Hey, guess what? There are people searching for Milwaukee dentists," well, if I'm a dentist in Milwaukee, it's pretty hard for me to argue, "I don't think they're looking for us."

And you can get even more specific. So I could go long tail or longer tail and I can say, "Hey, they're looking in our neighborhood, in our specific region, or they're looking for particular features that we have or particular services that we uniquely offer." All of those things can help to narrow that, make that very, very obvious intent.

Step 2: Highlight search volume and competition

The second thing is you're going to want to highlight, probably with a slide or a presentation, showing this off in a reason simple fashion. There are people searching for these types of terms, things like "Milwaukee dentist" or "Brewers Hill dentist," Brewers Hill being a neighborhood in Milwaukee, "Milwaukee dentists that accept Badger Care," a particular kind of insurance or dental discount, "Milwaukee pediatric dentists" serving kids. Makes sense.

You want to show off the volume. This isn't like keyword research that SEOs would do. The keyword research that we would do would include different types of metrics, but you want to show them volume because you're trying to illustrate how many people are looking for these things each month, and then you want to show: Are you or are we ranking for this already, and are the people we think of as our top competitors in the market, the three dental practices right around us, are they ranking?

If it's the case that they are, yes, yes, yes, no, no, yes a little, no. Aha, this is a phenomenal way to convince folks, even folks who are not necessarily motivated by the, "Hey, people are searching for us," they are often motivated by the, "People are going to our competitors instead of us because we haven't invested in this channel or in this practice." That can be a great case to make.

Step 3: Start with AdWords, and show the cost->clicks comparison

A lot of times you need to really prove it with small business owners, especially the skeptical ones. So starting with AdWords is a great way to go, especially because you can then show the cost to clicks comparison. So, for example, let's say we're going to run a 90-day ad campaign. We don't have to run it for all 90 days. We could run a campaign for a week, maybe even just three days, and if we get enough data, we can use that to extrapolate out.

We can say, "Okay, we know that a 90-day ad campaign with Google, to get us into these sorts of average positions and get this much traffic, will cost us approximately $3,000. We think it will bring us about 450 clicks based on what we've observed so far. That translates to about 10 leads, because we get about 1 per 40 to 50 visits, and we close about half the leads that come to us through search." All right. That's a 200% ROI, assuming that the average customer is spending $500 with us on their first visit, whatever it is. There's your ROI number.

Now, what would happen if we ran a 90-day SEO campaign? Well, it turns out that's going to cost us $6,000. Maybe that's three months of half of this person's salary, or it is three months of using this particular consultant or that kind of thing. What do we expect? Well, we expect that search visits, versus the 90 days prior to the campaign, for the 90 days after the campaign, not during the campaign because you'll be slowly ramping up. So you've got sort of that before period where you're here, the during period where you're ramping up, and the after period where you're sort of at that higher new medium.

After that, we're going to expect that we're going to get 900 new visitors from search. We think we can get 25 leads from that. We think we can close 12, approximately half of those, and we think the ROI will be 250%. So now we can start to do those ROI comparisons, and you can see, aha, SEO is, it appears, a better investment, generally speaking. Plus you make this investment and then if you can explain to the folks, "Hey, guess what? After traffic goes up, it stays up. We don't have to keep paying for it every time. Not every click costs us money." You run that campaign, it goes on ad infinitum.

Step 4: Transparently show the process and examples of your results

You want to transparently show your process, preferably speaking with as similar examples as you possibly can, but not directly competitive. So what I mean here is: "Hey, we talked to Rita's Bake Shop last year. We did some work for her. Rita was nowhere in Google. She wasn't showing up at all. We verified her local listings. Let me show you what a local listing is. We built her some links. Let me show you some of the links that we acquired. Some of them were from press. Some of them were from getting her included in local listing services, and we did some keyword research and targeting. So we changed up some of her pages, and I'll show you some examples of that in my slide pitch deck."

"In six months, you can see from her Google Analytics, traffic grew 500%." You don't have to show off the actual traffic. You can scrub the axis on the side there so that the numbers don't appear, and you can simply show the growth. And search is now her number two source of new customers behind only referring customers, which is terrific.

You want to illustrate this process so that it doesn't seem mysterious. It doesn't seem like, "Oh, you couldn't do this yourself." It's just... it's challenging. There's a lot of work to do. You have to know the ins and outs of it. Someone has to actually go and do these things.

A lot of skepticism is not always in the small business world because of ROI or lack of belief that it might do something, but lack of understanding about the process and a lack of communication between SEO professionals or marketing professionals and the end customer or the client or the team, the boss, the manager.

Step 5: Listen to objections and concerns with empathy

You should be willing to listen. Absolutely, you have to listen to objections and concerns with empathy. If you're a potential person who's complaining like, "Hey, we had these problems in the past. This is why I don't invest. This is why I prefer just to run some Facebook ads, or why I prefer not to get involved with the Internet at all. We have this other service that say they do SEO for us, why would we need to go with you as well?"

Even though you're listening and you're obviously going to be answering those objections, hopefully with data and information as well as with empathetic concern, you should be willing to walk away from poor matches, and there are going to be a lot of them.

Every consultant I've talked to and many, many in-house, unfortunately, marketing folks who do SEO have said, "Yeah, there were a lot of times where we had to do a ton of work to convince our potential client or a team or a boss to invest in us. Then once we got rolling, there was just impediment after impediment because the belief wasn't really there. The trust wasn't there, and the willingness to invest wasn't there." If those things are lacking, this process is just going to be way harder than going out and pitching someone else. So I might urge you to do that.

All right, everyone, look forward to hearing some of your tips in the comments for how you've convinced small and medium business owners to invest in SEO, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.

It is nice and sad at the same time to see the "educate your clients" topic popping up in a post like this.

Nice because it is an evergreen topic, which is usually given for granted but that would need to be talked more and explained more.

Sad, because it is an evergreen topic, status that is telling us how many SEOs are struggling with this facet of their job since the very beginning of SEO.

So, it would be nice to offer more posts or even a dedicate "learn SEO" section on Moz for this topic too, because it is logically fundamental to know how to do SEO, but equally important is to know how to sell SEO, and on this side of our job, SEO are not really the best practitioners in general :-).

Even more important, and maybe worth a specific post, is what you say at the end: "How to learn to say no".

You always have a great view point on posts and this is another great one. I think the community could benefit greatly from having this type of article in the learn section as it helps us convey properly the benefits of SEO.

I think adding something along those lines to the Learn SEO section here would indeed be valuable. I'll make sure to bring it up once we hire our new head of SEO & Content Strategy (applications welcome!) :-)

Rand, you are doing a great job. Your videos are very informative. I am already convinced that MOZ is a must for small businesses and doing some research: how I will be benefited from Pro MOZ. Keep up the good work!

Good point and idea. Even the best consultants will have to deal with challenging clients at some point in their career. Years go, I curated a learn SEO 101 (with videos) for my client's right-hand guy in charge of the SEO project. He took that learning to his boss (my client), and began to train volunteers and interns. Then he changed his title to SEO specialist... lol. To my knowledge, the material he learned was basic SEO and not near enough to make anyone a specialist. Clients don't know the difference, so that is where things get difficult for SEOs when dealing with small business clients.

To write an article on how to train a client is an excellent, and I suggest touching on this point: How do you train your clients before they believe they don't need you (especially the ones that seem keen to learn more and keep asking questions). Some small business clients have plenty time, and if you give them a roadmap to SEO 101, there is high possibility your client can take it from there and walk away. Is it a mistake to walk away? Yes, but the client doesn't know it. Likewise, If you don't train the client, someone else will and they will go with that person. In the end, many times these are poor matches and the intentions and willingness are simply not there, like Rand said.

Solution: The way I have gone around this is by not exclusively saying just SEO, present the client with an integrated plan and all SEO touch points at the beginning of the project (either in conversations during the project chatter, or creative brief). During this process, listening and establishing a good communication from the start is the key, in that it can prevent many potential issues in the future. Explain to the client how extensive and in-depth it goes. Even if the client doesn't understand it all, the point here is to give the client the correct first perception before a norm is formed.

Read more about client/team norms: http://blog.bluemediaconsulting.com/post/why_teams_go_bad_groupthink_a_team_norm_that_contaminates_teams

Give the perception that it is time consuming, has many moving parts-- some can be seen, others the client can't see. Tell the client about scenarios and solutions before they come about. For the micro-manage clients I create Daily journals of what has been done-- of course many times the client won't go over it because it is just a list, but it will give the client peace of mind and a sense they can't do it themselves. The client has to know it can't be learned in two weeks and it is not easy, and that the work done by the SEO is valuable, which it is.

At the end of the month, give the reports and overall information the client really needs. With other clients this is all they need, but with small business clients the overflow is part of the package. At an Adtech conference in New York, a few years ago, a German firm said, "walk away!" Many times saying no and walking away, can also be the best thing you over did.

A very important topic by Rand (thanks for sharing your 5 step process buddy).

Gianluca Fiorelli's top comment ended with “How to learn to say no”, so I thought I’d share my experiences with clients and help you ladies and gents out a bit.

First a bit of background: when I started my company several years ago, I used various account management and pre-qualifying skills, that I’d developed from my previous career as an IT sales guy. However, when I started out in sales, my pre-qualification mindset sucked. Big time.

Part of my challenge was that, in the early days, I often spoke gobbledygook and would jargon the hell out of prospects. As most of them weren’t SEO-minded, they'd give me the Jim Carrey treatmentand rightly so.

Over the course of time, I learned that pre-qualifying in (and out) clients was specifically a mindset that I needed to develop – and you do too.

There’s a sh?t ton of best-fit clients that desperately need your expertise, your experience, your heart and your soul to help them thrive (or survive) as a business – don’t waste all your energy on vampires or energy-stealers

Worst-fit clients often don’t pay on time. Are you willing to have your cash-flow messed up because of them? Think real hard about this..

One of the biggest barriers I come across is that SEO takes time. Small business want, and need, an instant audience at low cost. Also a few I have come across are still stuck on being #1 for all the keywords they want to rank for. It comes down to teaching the owners about how SEO works and setting expectations.

Rand's point #3 is a must have for my presentation...and it works! Well done.

The approach and sales pitch for SEO has every small business owner in a corner. Every "SEO" guy or gal that walks into a small business and leads with "I'm an SEO Expert" is instantly going to turn a business owner off. Why?

More and more, you get companies like the yellow pages or companies that have no business pitching SEO at all because they do not create an individualistic approach (which every SEO should). What you get is sales reps from all walks of life going into small businesses and pitching SEO, Rankings, High Placements Number One Listing and we all love the well known... Guaranteed Number One Results!

After building a 5-10 page website with a privacy policy copied verbatim from the BBB website and a keyword density of 10-20%, the "SEO" company calls it a day and they move onto the next one... Thanks Sales Guy!

My point is, most small business owners have been burned by one company or another. Its now more challenging for a real hard working SEO company to provide trustworthy, white hat services because of the disbelief these business owner have.

Going into these situations, like @Rand said, thank you by the way, give them real life examples. Give them on page examples, off page examples, sit down with them and HELP THEM UNDERSTAND SEO. Even it takes you three hours to explain your secret formula, and why you do what you do, at least you helped educate someone on the process. And, you will probably get the deal. Just be real with business owners, they want to understand this stuff, so help them understand.

Don't worry, they are not going to start an SEO company next door and if they do, you are better anyway, right?

Try checking out the 'Keyword Planner' tool set in Google Adwords; you can use it to target specific locations and get traffic estimates for keywords. It's a relatively fast, easy, and cheap (free) way of getting that data.

As @Rand has touched on, I would say that the two most important things to earn a business owner's trust is to educate them and show proof that SEO works.

Educate: Though SEO is much more mainstream these days, it is still a vague term to the uninitiated. Many people don't understand the true value and potential of SEO. It is your job to educate them on any questions they may have or reverse any misconceptions / expectations they may have.

Show Proof: You should have case studies that emphasizes the results from your previous SEO campaigns. Compare this to what it would cost for adwords.

Compare Long Term Value: Over the long run, how much can they expect to save with an SEO campaign, versus an adwords campaign for the same keywords?

Show the Keywords that need some love: Use something like SEMrush to find out what keywords need some love. See which keywords they rank for, but that are not position 1-3 rankings. Maybe compile a list of second page rankings. Filter these by high CPC, and competition level (for SEO not adwords data). Then give them the list of keywords with associated value forecasts (using CPC and volume). Explain to them that beyond whatever other keywords you plan on using for their campaign (with forecasts), tell them that you also compiled a list of keywords they are close to ranking already - which may be fairly easy to bring up in the SERPS and provide a lot of value for them.

I think giving them tangible proof, and tangible keywords/ forecasts will make it easier to sell your services.

Rand, the last part of walking away really struck it for me. Walking away from deals and clients is, I've found, the most challenging of all, identifying the early symptoms of it, knowing when and how to cut loose, etc. Prequalifying clients is also a hard to learn skill! (thanks Tony Dimmock for the tips on saying no!)

This part is golden: "Then once we got rolling, there was just impediment after impediment because the belief wasn't really there. The trust wasn't there, and the willingness to invest wasn't there. If those things are lacking, this process is just going to be way harder than going out and pitching someone else. So I might urge you to do that."

I've come to understand that there has to be a baseline belief in just marketing in general by your client to start out. Especially if you are pitching small local businesses. It's very possible that they've never done any marketing at all, even if they've been around for years and years. If you come in to offer SEO or PPC, sure that will help them, and maybe they'll see the light a bit. But if they don't have a general marketer, you'll be expected to manager or guide them on all the other marketing channels as well. You'll need to prod them to actually do social media, write the content, send the emails, and more.

So my point is that if you are trying to offer a specific service like SEO, it could be a red flag if they don't currently have a marketing manager. If the owner is the marketing manager, they have to truly believe in it and have spent time doing it themselves before they hired you, or else you're training them from the beginning and it's an uphill battle to get strong momentum and results in 90 days or 6 months.

What's interesting is that the SBA defines a small business differently depending on industry, often up to 500 or 1,000 employees. So small business means a lot of things to a lot of people. I think to most of us, something under $5 million a year in revenue is small, over that is more medium business. In my experience, you want to try to hit those businesses that are bringing in millions in revenue per year, not the small mom-and-pop shops or upstarts because they'll grind you down on pricing.

I always use 1, 2, 4 step to convince my customers and this really help me but when someone suggest me to share the comparison between SEO and Adwords to clients then I say NO. Why it is? It is because they don’t want to listen about huge investment then other method. Even they don’t want to listen about the result (ROI), may be sometimes they will be convinced but it is riskier.

Well nice ways described here Rand, I will take that 3 step risk next time and will try to make my client my companies Fan. :)

Exact. The first steps are seeking what my strengths to establish them as possible keywords, check if those strengths we can find our client, continue checking the market and competitors, correctly assess the results and evaluate whether that keyword interests us. So always

Loved your article! I started working with small companies and can totally feel identified with your article. Maybe it's cause I live in Majorca and since it's a small mediterranean island, we live from the tourism, and it makes it easier to convince them that they need SEO cause every company want to be the first to be found when they search, for example, "rent a car in Mallorca".

Plus, in Spain we still are very far away from the Marketing evolution, so a lot of people still don't know what SEO is. Sometimes it's a plus because you can show them the toold you're using, how you're going to show them their progress and the results it can have, they are quickly convinced.

Your post is a really nice guideline for those who want to start doing marketing in a small company, really useful WBF! :D

Well... I would not exaggerate saying that "in Spain we are very far away from the Marketing evolution"...

I mean, that was partly true few years ago, but now - and especially because of the economic crisis - many businesses, also small to medium ones, have finally realized the importance of doing web marketing (or you don't see how many SEO roles are requested in any job offer portal)

Another kind of problem is that this need has been understood by rogue "digital marketing companies" first (also big ones), which sold presumed "SEO services"... but that something that happens also in every other country.

Sincerely, in Spain we can see some of the most amazing SEO professionals and some of the most interesting SEO and Digital Marketing campaigns, also in the small to medium business niche, and - sorry if I rant - but comments like yours are starting to upset me a little because they mirror an attitude, which is not the correct to have:

because somehow it is the expression of a sort of resignation;

because it simply tries to find the problems in some external factors, when many time they are internal (eg.: not being able to communicate our value proposition)

because it is giving to "USA/UK" SEOs a sort of "god status" ("they are all great"), which is not so, as experience taught me from having seen how knowledge and evolution always has moved in a bidirectional way, and which is not correct also because the culture is different.

I totally understand and respect your point of view, but I was talking from my personal experience. Obviously if there are hudreds of companies, a lot of them are doing well, but it's not all the companies case. If you search a company in Madrid or Barcelona, of course you'll see wonders of SEO, but what I meant is that in many places of Spain they still are not familiarized with the marketing world (some of them think they don't need it, or it's a waste of money cause they want to see fast results and we all know SEO doesn't works that way...).

Obviously you for sure must know much more than me about this since I'm new in the industry, but a few years ago when I started my degree everyone was asking me what Marketing was, so I totally like and respect your opinion, but I've another one. I just wasn't trying to create a discussion in here, was just trying to give my point of view from my reality.

Talking about the crisis, it took me like 3 years to get a SEO internship because they wanted someone who was 20 with 30 years of experience, and trust me, I've sent sooooooo many CV's though I had experience in a lot of marketing companies, but I hadn't touch SEO and I wanted to try.

And finally, I'm not a defender of USA or UK's SEO, they do really well of course, but I wasn't thinking in them at all while writing it.

I totally empathize with your perspective Palmer. I think it's certainly the case that geographic distance and the degree to which there's a marketing/technology ecosystem locally can have a strong influence on the feelings we all have about our place in this subculture. Despite Seattle being a very strong tech city compared to others, we're always playing second or third fiddle to Silicon Valley and the greater Bay Area, and there's a perspective among plenty folks here (and elsewhere) that the *real* entrepreneurs are down there :-(

You're right Rand, and sometimes it's hard to create something big where you don't have much references. That's one of the main reasons why the Moz Comunity is such a reference to me, twelve years later you've people from all over the world using your tools and participating in you blog so it's always nice to have some examples in front of you :)

In case of clients, it would always be better to let them know benefits first then investment. Most of the clients are really not aware abut SEO and they start thinking like "why should we worried about the ranking over Google?". They saying "My business is running well since many years, even I never done SEO". Actually, this is time we need to let them know the Value of Google and SEO in simplest term rather than using technical terms which they are completely unaware about.

I mostly starts by letting them know what they missing if they are not at Google and you know what is that "its bunch of people, may be searching for something which belongs to your business".

Once they got value of Google and what they missing if they are not at in search results, we can move further with the methods described in above video...

Exactly what I was looking for. :) Just a little question for the step 3: when you show the comparison between organic search and AdWords, do you show fictional numbers, campaigns to your client to show the importance of SEO?

I'd try to show real numbers wherever possible. Those could be on small test campaigns, on other clients (keeping their identity a secret but just showing the numbers), or on case studies that your past clients have agreed to make public/transparent.

Convincing potential client or a boss to invest in SEO is crucial and challenging. You have to show them what benefits they can acquire if they invest with this marketing aspect. The points you've mentioned are simply understandable and can be absorbed certainly.

I hate to say it, but switching to a Marketing Consultant versus an SEO Company was the best thing I ever did for my business. Small business owners know phone calls, customers, and sales. Too many SEOs (I was guilty of this too) talk too much about stuff prospects don't care about or can't understand.

The 90-day chart is cool, but in 'real life' as you mentioned, the SEO side results won't happen for months..and even then it might not be consistent versus paid advertising which I can pretty much guarantee those clicks and adjust them on the fly.

In 'real life', I can also sell that left side all day long because that is the first 90 days of business and gives them an immediate ROI versus the SEO side that is just a fairy tale in the business owner's mind until it actually lines up and they are getting that exact traffic from search and attribute verifiable leads to it.

Paid traffic I can setup standalone landing pages with call tracking, lead forms, conversion pixels, etc...for SEO most of the time you have to do the best you can with tracking on the client's actual website. Form submits and online purchases are easy, but did that call come from Direct, Referral, or Organic traffic?. Hopefully they are asking on the phone so you can find out!

I've found a hybrid-service that combines the short term win (PPC, FB Ads, Media Buy) for immediate ROI with long term wins (SEO, Content Marketing, etc) is easier for business owner's to digest.

Ultimately it comes down to providing the best solution for the client based on their goals, timeline, and budget...and then managing that expectation due to the volatility of the search engines.

I still sell a lot of SEO, but am finding the easier buy-ins are happening with the hybrid approach. Just food for thought.

Well in India you just cant speak only from a point of SEO or for that matter of Digital Marketing only. You have to give client a 360 degree marketing solutions.

Personally I have faced a lot of challenge in my very early days of doing Digital Marketing. The usual response used to, and still come often, that we are getting x number of leads without doing anything. So why we should go with Digital Marketing. So the class begins of teaching the impact of Digital Marketing.

At last, I end up saying we just dont give you online marketing solutions but off line marketing solutions as well. And I explain them what my earlier client was doing wrong, without giving out the name of the client, so this draw attention of this guys. They think that I am giving out extra peace of information without charging a extra penny apart from my SEO Services. I think, this is the common practice in the rest of the world. We have to go to an extra mile to DELIGHT our customers.

If a prospect doesn't understand or trust you, they won't buy your brilliant seo plan. Speak in a language they understand. I use library and old fashion maps a lot to simplify the logic. Besides going through a length of time to get the job, the web development team and SEO analysts were head-butting a lot. I felt like a UN peacekeeper between the two teams until they really learned to work together.

Nice post! Step 1 is great. Show potential client search queries with obvious intent is a winner alone. Educating a client on this fact and showing the client how much business their are losing is a great sales pitch. Step 2, highlighting search volume and competition is a basic one but great technique as well. When I started doing SEO this was in only step I used to convince clients to buy my SEO services. Step 3, start with AdWords and show the cost --> clicks comparison. I'm meeting with a potential client tomorrow and I will present step 3 as one of my tools for ascertaining clients. Thanks Rand for that tasty little nugget. Step 4, transparency showing the process and examples of your results. I've been doing this by way of a SEO Tasklist that walks the client through the project from beginning to end, month by month, and shows exactly what work is being done and when. Step 5, listen to objections and concerns with empathy. Step 5, is a therapeutic step. A lot of times as a salesman we try to force sales to make yourself feel good about yourself but the enjoyment is sometime short lived. When it comes to forced sales, these are the clients that usually drop out the SEO project but for it's done and results in a negative comment or a bad review. The take away here is be clear, educate them on SEO and let them know what to expect from the project.

Very useful for my small business, my online language website. At the beginning I think I made so many mistakes as I bought so many back links from others but I did not check the quality of the links and I think after Google saw those links they might have penalised my website and my page rank of website decreasedfrom 5 to 4 then 3 , 2 then i cant find it.

I am having a very hard time to solve this. Your suggestion helped me but i need more help.

Thanks for this. I work in house and have been trying to explain the importance of SEO for a while, this video helps set it out in black and white. I think im going to use this as a template for a presentation to the CEO next week. Wish me luck.

Yes the tips are really Awesome, some of these points we are following before & few more exactly needed points got from your WBF Friday..Thanks A Lot Rand for your Help to Small & medium business in a deep look...:) All Time your guide is help us improve a lot....

Another great post. I have some doubts over goal of small businesses. Usually small businesses go for short term goals rather than long term. As SEO is more like long term as compared to PPC which obviously gives instant results and easy to get an ROI. Small businesses usually restrain from investing in any thing that is going to give results after some time.

Great video Rand, I think you've just given a boost to the economy with this information because it so decently shows SEOs how to effectively propose their services with a balanced and ordered plan. Thanks again and as usual for these tips!

Great topic, conversing Small-business is always a challenging task. But, with similar progress stories and example it become easy . The only thing which I fear from such clients sometime is the trust value in between, which is kept on edge for lot of times. Rest working with small business is always fun!

I have a small local toy business and I feel identified with what you expose.The problem I have is that I have physical store in the street and e-commerce and it is difficult to decide whether to make the local seo designed to attract more customers to the store or seo to sell more online all over the country. I think it's important to point number 1. Whether in title, H1, meta title, placing the province, municipality where you have the business. In my case, I have a title goal of "toy store in Fuengirola," and it works.

+1 for SEMRush. I also like Followerwonk for comparing Twitter accounts and Open Site Explorer, Majestic, or Ahrefs for comparing link profiles. SimilarWeb Pro is the best, IMO, for comparing traffic levels and channels that send traffic.

I´m trying Sistrix and it looks great, for European Countries at least. I'm used to these tools and saw some really impressive features in Sistrix as they collect data from most medium/big websites regarding traffic, keywords etc, hence you can build a competitor's matrix profile only by knowing the real world competitors url and making a small research.

Thank you, Rand for this article. One of the biggest challenges for companies who offer SEO to small business owners is indeed convincing them that SEO pays off. In our experience, this is not just in the beginning of the process. Even if we have set the proper expectations at the beginning and closed the deal, the fact that SEO takes time is crucial in some cases. Often business owners expect quick results and change their mind after the first or the second month of the optimization, even though we have discussed the time frames with them at the beginning. In such cases the SEO company actually needs to close the deal again, going through the same exact process.

I have not struggled with this too much but finding the right way to get across to a new client why SEO is the way to go has and can be a struggle. Myself I think of a similar approach but did not have the same finesse as you which I plan on using in the future. For me I typically show some basic searches to let them see their competitors and then show them through my tactics I can help them rank above them and what they are lacking through a basic audit.

So really just your step 1-3 but when you start to put a PPC focus on what they could spend, their ROI, and how with some effort organic SEO can help them get customers, but also beat out their competitors with an overall better performing site getting them as a client seems easier. The last part is the most vital you mentioned which is just to demystify what you are going to do. I have to say that almost all small business owners have heard of SEO but when you layout a plan for them and state what you are going to do and how you are going to do it they will then have a sense of relief seeing what you are going to do and the challenges you will have. Keeps everyone on an even playing flied.

Great topic and also a great way to help SEO's convey to both clients, work peers, and anyone else of why what we do works.

All day long our phones are ringing from salespeople in India pitching SEO services and local business optimization. After scamming so many small businesses, most owners we deal with consider SEO a four letter word.

This was a great WBF, unfortunately in my experience, if the small business owner doesn't have a clue why his business needs SEO you have a hard time convincing them... On the other hand, if the Small business Owner knows what SEO is, but considers it a a waste of time, money, and energy, and thinks of SEOs as people who "steal from the naive people", then it's best to leave those businesses alone, because you will only give a headache to your self.

It's always hard to find the right tone with those kind of sceptic people. My advice is that if the small business owner is sceptic about SEO then even if he due decides on a contract it will not bee as good as planned since the "boss" will always know everything better the you, and will not give you free hand on the strategy, and this will not end good...

Great topic though. It was interesting to learn how the "sharks" think about this universal issue.

I love pitching SEO to small businesses! They rarely tell me they don't need it, and always seem interested. As part of my pitch though, I always offer to teach and train the small business client. It's a great way to help earn their trust, and establish a strong relationship in the long run. They don't usually cancel because they think they can do it themselves once they know more about it. It's more likely they need to spend the time running their small business, and are happy to have someone help with the technical and content details.

In my experience, it's the bigger companies that have trouble investing in SEO, because they usually have one or more senior marketers who are familiar enough with SEO to think they know better or that it's not important. Lol.

Hi Cynthia, that's very interesting that you have an alternate experience with rejection. I have also thought of offering training as it seems to me that it would offer some level of transparency and trust. Then when they see that they really don't have the time or the expertise (even though they've been "trained") they will remember you to help them out.

Hi Rand - I think it could be helpfull that there is a target group in the internet. I met a lot of busines-owners wich said: may target group is 50- 70 years old - they don't use the interenet. For nearly everything there is a target-group in the internet.

I have still the big problem that a lot of people think SEO is just putting keywords on a site - done. Or that it is a bad thing. A lot of people tell me: A your job is cheating Google.. How can you explain (in short) that this is not the truth? Not the Cheating Google and not the Keyword-Stuffing part. Most business-owners don't have time and interest in discuss SEO with you.

Yes people can say that "your job is cheating google" But my question is that can anyone run their own business without customers and can they make their customer without any kind of marketing strategy? If a person wants to be in top position in his business niche and another one who know and help that how or by which process you can get good rank in Google search? Than I don't think there is any kind of wrong thing in it.

I dont like the cheating POV. I work on pages to make google think "this is the best result - the one I should show in SERPs - the best answer for a question". Tahey are made by and for human beeings. I really don't like what a lot of people think I am doing - it is simply the opposite of my daily work :) Internet is still a new black box for a lot of people here

The vast majority of market participants in most of the countries are still not aware of the need and possibilities of SEO or online marketing in general. So concentrate on those who understood the the idea of online marketing and its challenges. Your (and our) challenge is to be found by or find these customers and not use energy of educating the other market participants.

The attitude that SEO is "cheating" Google is the opposite of how I think about and talk about our field. We are here to make content better, to satisfy users' searches better, to improve the web and then promote those improvements. We're the ones making what Google crawls and indexes worth showing to the world, and we're constantly one-upping each other, bringing greater and greater value to both searchers and search engines. The days of SEO as "tricking Google" are almost entirely dead - just a few nails left to put in that coffin and I think Google's going to keep hammering effectively (that next Penguin update has been taking a long time, but it's coming).

Thats true, but for me - not my possible clients or google users here. Like I said - I try to make the web a better place - special for the users, an I can truly see how google rewards that. But the clients don't believe that - still don't believe that. But they wont discuss that - so at least I have to come arround with that possible money - like gianluca said.

Great pitch, Rand. I think the best way to get the contract would be to have you pitch it.

Usually, my clients already know what they want out of SEO from previous campaigns or spending way too much on Adwords. I have run into some, however, that can't get on the Internet without help so the proof in numbers would be equally ineffective.

Those are probably the bad fit type but we try to please everyone. Fortunately, we work on an hourly basis so get paid accordingly for time spent explaining the process.